Eat the Damn Cake

This post is for Cate, who commented here. 

I am a dreamer.

I want big things. I want gorgeous settings. I am idealistic. I am impractical.

I am old enough to know better, so I don’t think I will ever know better.

I am fragile. I want to be famous. God, that’s embarrassing. At least there’s this: I don’t want to be famous and get invited to all the best penthouse parties and know all the names of the owners of the sexiest clubs. I don’t want fame to follow me outside, into the street. I want to be a famous writer. I want people to read my words and disappear briefly inside them. That’s what happened to me, as a kid, reading fantasy novels. I slipped inside another world. I want to do that for people.

I am a failure. I tried being practical. I tried growing up right. At fifteen, I got my first serious job. I worked through college. For a while, I was making more money than all of my friends. I was a little smug about it, when a guy who liked me bragged about how much he made at his job, repairing computers, and I made more. Don’t say anything, I thought. Don’t you dare say anything. I really wanted to say something. I only let myself get A’s, and I only considered Ivy League grad schools-- I got into the one my professors wanted for me. There was this straight, groomed path, and I was on it, and I was going to take my degrees out into the world and knock on a bunch of impressive doors with them (they make a more important sound than just my bare hand), and things would fall into place.

And then I couldn’t.

(that’s my backpack. And my chocolate milk. This is where I was writing yesterday)

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Guys– not to bug you, but ETDC’s sneakpeeq giveaway is ending on the 13th, and since you get 20% off your next purchase just for entering, plus a chance at a $25 gift card, it’s definitely worth it. Also, this time there are lots of winners. Check it out here!

I noticed it when I was fourteen or so, and I started making a semi-regular effort. I had this great outfit, with a short skirt, and it perfectly matched the butterfly clips I wore in my hair. My mom was driving me to meet some friends, and there was this cute guy who distinguished himself by having a few muscles, and he was supposed to be there. So obviously I’d doubled the number of butterfly clips, and I’d shaved my legs immediately before leaving, so that they would be freshly smooth. I was hoping they might gleam a little.

Getting out of the car, and walking towards my friends, who were hanging out by an ice cream place in a strip mall (New Jersey!), I happened to glance down. I stopped in my tracks. Blood was trickling down my legs. It looked as though I had been shot, many times, by a tiny soldier– like one of those little guys from The Indian in the Cupboard. There were bloody tears all over my legs. It was a war zone. It was horrifying. I ducked for cover behind the car, licked my hands like a crazed animal, and began trying to rub the blood away. I got most of it, but my legs were left looking raw, agitated, and generally unfriendly. I hadn’t felt the cuts in the shower. I thought there was probably something wrong with me. Do I not feel pain? Am I superwoman? No, probably just a freak who will never have sexy legs. Yes. That’s the truth. I know because it’s the worst possibility.

I’d like to say I got a lot better at shaving my legs over the years, but that would be a lie, and I’m bad at lying (my mom caught me too many times in too many lies as a child, and I’m traumatized).

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This is a guest post.  Sarah is a first-year graduate student, getting her PhD in philosophy. She and I have been writing back and forth for around a year now. When she talked with me about her hair, I begged her to write a guest post for me. Here it is (begging works). She is awesome: 

I am bald, I am 22, and I am female. Sometimes I think that this is an unfortunate combination of traits; but other times, I feel differently.

To make a very long and painful story rather shorter: I had just turned fourteen when my hair began to fall out. It was the beginning of eighth grade. It started innocently enough with a few extra strands left behind in my comb after I showered. At first, I thought nothing of it, but it quickly became very apparent that what was happening was something I needed to think seriously about. Because it was all gone before I turned fifteen.

The year my hair fell out was the worst year of my life. Maybe this is biased, but I contend that eighth graders are the cruelest creatures to inhabit that awkward chunk of life known as ‘adolescence’.  To be fair, it’s a tough time for everyone. We want people to acknowledge that we exist, but not as much as we want to blend inconspicuously into the background. To say that it is difficult for a rapidly balding female to go unnoticed in this environment is a laughable understatement. My middle school morphed into a freak-show and I was the main attraction. My classmates pointed and sneered and snickered and laughed; I tried my hardest to escape their piercing stares, but found myself trapped in a nightmare that had become my life.

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This is a question I’m not crazy about: “What do you do?”

Like most people, I do a lot of things. Every day. But I don’t have a title.

I could make something up. Something like “Mistress of Mystery and Empress of Really Cool Things.” But I’m bad at lying, so instead I usually say, “I write.”

And then they say, “Oh yeah? Where?”

And I could say, “On a train, sometimes, but usually at the table, or on the couch. There are also a lot of to-do lists on my phone.”

But I am not rude. So I try to remember where the last impressive place I got published was, and then, inevitably, it turns out that they don’t read that publication. The other day I met someone who had never heard of the Huffington Post. (That’s the place I mention when I can’t think of anything else quickly enough.) It wasn’t the first time.

Some of my friends have great titles. I have a feeling they get invited to cooler parties than me. I don’t get invited to that many parties.

Bear has a really impressive-sounding title. Which is why he doesn’t like to say it. He thinks it sounds braggy to use your impressive title. He thinks you should down-play it. He doesn’t see why it should matter.

If I could steal his title, I feel like I would rock it. I would practice saying it without grinning. I would get good.

I want a title, because I think that if I had one, I would trip over my words less. It would sound more like I’m doing the things that I’m already doing. It would sound more like those things are important.  I would be able to stop making jokes about “when I publish that book…” that sound more like “oh god, please, I hope I get a book published one day! I really, really hope.”

I want a title because I think that people will respect me more if I have one. They will talk about me with each other after I leave, like this: “Kate is really impressive. She’s such a high achiever. I mean, she’s Mistress of Mystery and everything. Not everyone can do that. Let’s be honest, even Lady Gaga wouldn’t be able to do that, and she can wear the highest heels of anyone.”

“Oh my god, I know! I wish I was Kate! It’s like, you just know she’s doing impressive things all day long.”

“Yeah, exactly. You just know. From her title.”

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Note before I start this post:

So I’m going to pick a giveaway winner tonight, sometime after 9:30, which is when I’m deciding (now, as I write this) to officially end the contest. I’ll announce the winner tomorrow. If you haven’t entered, there’s still time! And thank you to everyone who is participating.

It’s been over three years since I got a nose job. Honestly, I can’t remember what month it was. Sometime during the summer.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember how much I hated my face. Enough to lie asleep while someone hacked it open. Enough to show up for the surgery even after my dad watched a live special on rhinoplasty and described it in horrifying detail to me (“and then there’s just this giant hole in the middle of your face because they flip the skin back, after they cut the piece, you know that little piece in between your nostrils? Yeah that one.”) It’s hard to remember how badly I wanted to look different. I was casual about it. I played it cool. “It’s just something I need to do, y’know?” But sometimes when I was alone, I would look in the mirror and cry because I hated my face so much. It felt unfair. So many other girls got a regular nose. And then they had regular faces. Why me? Seriously, God, what the hell?

And then I got the nose job, and, well, some of you know the story– it didn’t really make a difference.

“This has only happened to me one other time,” the surgeon told me apologetically, explaining that something had gone wrong.

Instead of my face being fantastically transformed, it was just slightly rearranged. Now my nose is a little crooked in places it didn’t use to be. It’s a little thinner at the bridge.

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Some people were saying in the comments the other day that I have an antiquated idea of what it means to be a woman.

Melanie said this: I think you have an amazingly antiquated view of womanhood in general. You have absorbed so many beauty standards. You spend time analyzing why you don’t conform to xxx and what is wrong w. you bc you don’t conform to xxx.

When I read that, I felt for a second as though I’d been slapped. Amazingly antiquated? Oh god. I’m terrible! Why am I so bad at being a modern woman? Is there something wrong with me for not being more confident? Since then, I’ve been thinking about what she said. It really confuses me. Which makes me want to think about it more but also makes me feel like I’m not making any progress when I think about it and after a while I just feel kinda stupid.

I don’t think there’s a big difference between having an antiquated view of womanhood and being an antiquated woman. At least not according to what Melanie says. I have an antiquated view. I have absorbed all of these beauty standards. Now they’re inside me. They’re a part of who I am. I can’t stop thinking about them. I am an antiquated woman.

What does it mean to be an antiquated woman?

Melanie suggests feeling bad about your appearance and overanalyzing it. Here are some of my own guesses (based on what pops into my mind when I hear the word “antiquated”): Cooking, cleaning, being in a marriage where your husband makes a lot more money than you, wanting babies, wearing your hair long and styled, making sure your nails are perfect all the time, reading lady mags, being bad at math, wearing tea dresses with pearls.

(source)

Or, if we’re talking, like, REALLY antiquated: lace-up corsets and therapy sessions where your doctor stimulates your clitoris for you, since you seem hysterical (that really, really used to happen. Did you guys know that’s how the vibrator was born? Because doctors’ fingers were getting so tired?)

I confess– I do some of those things on the first list. Can you guess which ones? Clue: I don’t have long hair.

But I don’t know any women who don’t do some of those things. And I don’t know any women who have never felt bad about their appearance. Which makes me think that probably all of this is part of being a woman right now. Today. In the modern age.

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